Above the school floats a giant, headless body, its arms outstretched. No one else has passed comment on it, so it seems we’re supposed to take it in our stride – just like how people in full-body suits are roaming these corridors at night with us, and how we’re welcomed home by a voice emanating from a dead student’s portrait. Some of these things will make sense later and others won’t, but much of 1000xResist’s slowly unfurling narrative puzzle (its opening seconds, after all, ostensibly show you the antagonist’s death) demands – and eventually rewards – your patience.
You control Watcher, one of a small group of clones of a girl named Iris, revered as the ‘Allmother’. Each clone has a specific task: as Watcher, your role is both to learn and preserve the Allmother’s history. This makes her the ideal vehicle for this story, since Watcher knows nothing yet, and so her lack of understanding matches yours. Via her companion, Secretary, a floating AI not unlike Destiny 2’s Ghost, Watcher can receive Iris’s memories. Memories, of course, are rarely considerate enough to occur in sequential order, and so Watcher has to steadily piece together a human life, one fragmented glimpse at a time.
As such, 1000xResist is perhaps best described as a hybrid of 3D visual novel and walking sim: you explore, examine everything you can look at and talk to everyone you encounter to steadily uncover more of the story. For the most part, it adopts a familiar over-theshoulder thirdperson perspective, but some sequences shift to a firstperson viewpoint, with the effect that these sections feel more personal and intimate.
Occasionally, you’re afforded the opportunity to view the past, present and future of a location, leafing through them with the press of a button. This allows you to solve light puzzles in the first chapter, such as passing through doors that are closed in the present but open in the past; later, this becomes less a gameplay tool and more a way to show you a rapid sequence of memories without forcing you to traipse back and forth so often. Elsewhere, you can traverse particularly fragmented memories by focusing on nodes around the environment and zipping from point to point as if equipped with a grappling hook.
Through these various forms of narrative exploration, you soon realise that in Watcher’s present, Earth is no more. The arrival of an invading alien force, the Occupants, was enough to kickstart a deadly pandemic, with Iris the only survivor. If anime has taught us anything, it’s that you probably shouldn’t leave the fate of the world up to traumatised highschoolers – but it’s that genre, as well as the work of Nier designer Yoko Taro, from which the game takes visual and thematic inspiration. Even so, the Asian-Canadian team at Sunset Visitor has delivered a story that stretches far beyond pastiche. This is an experience deeply rooted in the Asian
